October 24, 2005 – Desperately Seeking My Birthright

October 24, 2005 – Desperately Seeking My Birthright

For most of my upbringing, especially my childhood years, my friends—military dependents—would ask me where I was from. I would answer Manila, The Philippines. And then they would ask me what it was like, Manila. And I would answer that I didn’t know; I had left as an enfant and had no recollection of it save what my mother described to me of her recollections. When I went to Japan and found myself wandering around Tokyo on leave, I would occasionally be mistaken for Japanese, but the mistake quickly realized the moment I spoke in my broken attempt to respond in the language. When I first went to work for Bendix Field Engineering Corp. at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland outside of Washington, DC, I would be asked if I were from the Middle East, Mexico, or the Mediterranean. In more recent times in California, I’m commonly mistaken for Persian, Pakistani, or Indian.

The common misconception of my national origin has made me realize that I have a face, a complexion, and a personal demeanor that is a blank slate. Others read onto it what they perceive me to be, which is flattering of course, but it leaves me questioning who and what I am. I was born in an era when the world had begun to attach a paper record to your life. When my mother and I boarded the Military Sea Transport Ship, the David Shanks, in 1947 for our voyage to the U.S. we had a file containing an “Application for Transportation of Dependents from Overseas to the United States.” It was a form my father completed requesting that his wife and son be transported from Manila to his home in Brooklyn, Mississippi. The America Consulate General provided my mother a Visa to enter the U.S. Being my father’s son, I did not require one. Also included was the paper record of a medical examination that showed no signs of all the diseases that could have barred our passage: plague, tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, and social diseases of the day. There was also “Travel Orders” that put us aboard the David Shanks and deposited us in San Francisco in August of 1947. The other occasion I had to travel with my family outside of the Continental U.S. was in 1955 when my father was transferred for a 3-year tour of duty to Fort Buchanan Army Base outside of San Juan, Puerto Rico. My father carried the folder of papers that authorized this travel.

After I enlisted in the U.S. Navy, I had an occasion in 1965 to travel outside the U.S. on my own when I was stationed on the USNS Michelson, home ported at the U.S. Naval Station in Yokosuka, Japan. For that trip, the folder containing the paperwork directing this trip was in my possession. My travel orders as well as my personnel file. This was how each Navy installation identified me and determined what my duties were to be upon reporting for duty. Of course I was expected everywhere I was sent. And had I not showed up, there would have been hell to pay. My travel to Japan was again entirely through military transport. I passed through no Japanese customs or immigration. The fact that I was walking about in Japan in civilian clothes with no other identification except my U.S. Navy ID card spoke tomes of the power of the military. Likewise, when the ship I was serving aboard returned to the U.S. for a month in dry dock to upgrade electronics and repair the ship’s engine and drive systems, we sailed up the Columbia River and disembarked and walked the streets of Portland with no other identification than our Navy ID Card, no U.S. customs, no U.S. immigration.

When I went to work for Bendix and they requested that I adquire a passport in case I needed to travel to overseas facilities, I thought the process would be a simply matter of completing an application form. The military had sent me throughout the world. Surely getting a passport would be no trouble. Alas, it was not an easy process. The passport office requested a copy of my birth certificate, which I didn’t have. I submitted instead a baptismal certificate, which was not sufficient to satisfy the requirement. It had been more than sufficient to get me enlisted in the Navy and to allow me to enjoy all the benefits of military service, the G.I. Bill, two years of electronics education at the Navy’s expense, etc. But, I was no longer in the military; I was a civilian and I needed a passport to travel the world. Several months pass as I attempted to provide the U.S. Department of State, documentation that would suffice in place of a birth certificate. The flow of documents back and forth was making me anxious of my ability to convince the State Department I was entitled to a U.S. passport; notwithstanding a paper trail twenty three years long amassed while living in the U.S. as a fully enfranchised citizen. I was the son of my father, a U.S. citizen and as long as he was there to tell whoever asked “this is my son” I was fine. But what would happen if he wasn’t around? Curiously, my mother, who held a green card until 1957, became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. and could prove her it if she were asked to do so. Being asked by the State Department to prove my claim of U.S. citizenship, I was coming up short.

I suddenly felt completely lost. Without a birth certificate, I could not claim citizenship to either the U.S. or to the country of my birth, The Philippines, where I had no official state record of being born save a baptismal certificate. This situation made me realize that I was adrift, an immigrant to the U.S. afforded citizenship by my birth father; a citizen of The Philippines by being born there—my documented leaving to come to the U.S. identifying the land of my birth. But, I could not provide adequate documentation to justify my claim to either country. The first lines of the poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” by Sir Walter Scott kept coming to mind throughout the months of correspondence with the State Department: “Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!…” What ultimately provided credence for the State Department of my claim of citizenship was my father and mother. They each completed individual sworn affidavit declaring the circumstance and whereabouts of my birth. Nine months after my first submission of the application for passport, I finally received in the mail, shortly before my departure from Bendix for a new job at Collins Radio Company in Dallas, Texas. The process had been a humbling experience and I came to appreciate the importance of one’s birthright.

Please find following Sir Walter Scott’s Poem

The Lay of the Last Minstrel (excerpt)
Sir Walter Scott

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored , and unsung.